tarbat house and royston house
Tarbat in Easter Ross and Royston in Granton, Edinburgh are two locations I’ve been researching for a while. I grew up close to Tarbat House and it was the first explore I ever did, sometime around 1974 when the by-then derelict georgian mansion was beginning to suffer from water entry; with several visits also throughout the 80s and 90s.
I remember one room being crammed with many years’ worth of rotting Variety magazines – clearly the last occupant, Sibell, fancied her hollywood gossip. I wonder if she ever saw Sunset Boulevard, with perhaps a flicker of recognition spreading across her face. The grounds still contain the remnants of a fabulous arboretum, which would easily have been the match of Mount Stuart, I think, in its glory days.
So firstly a very skittish summary of the houses -
Tarbat House, in Easter Ross, was bought back from the government and rebuilt by John MacKenzie (Major-General Lord MacLeod) in 1787. This replaced an earlier c.1650s “New Tarbat” house built by George Mackenzie, 1st Lord Tarbat, which was subsequently forfeited, along with the estates, from the Third Earl in 1746 as war reparation for the MacKenzie’s part in the doomed Jacobite ‘45 rebellion.
Now this first lord tarbat, George, also built Royston House in Edinburgh, presumably as his pied-a-terre close to government, apparently using building materials taken from the refurbishment of Holyrood Palace.
As an aside, I’ve discovered recently that the mysterious Shandwick Mains House, 10 minutes from Tarbat, was owned by John Cockburn Ross, who in 1806 gave the name to Shandwick Place in Edinburgh.
Now all it needs is for Al-Fayed to become First Minister and the Easter Ross/Edinburgh magnetisms will be complete – at last!!!
So now to these images, taken from the excellent Scotland’s Places site. The first is an image of the Earls’ of Cromarty Mausoleum at Kilmuir Easter Church (which I stood outside each schoolday to catch a bus home); and the second is the eerie sans-pictures living room shell, last inhabited by Sibell Lilian Blunt-Mackenzie, 3rd Countess of Cromartie; the final lone resident before the property went out of MacKenzie/MacLeod hands in 1962.
Images from and Copyright RCAHMS
